The Effect of Social Buttons and Taking Chances

Running the Best Paid Search Campaigns

Infographic: Conversion Killers: Is your Website Losing Money?

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The Effect of Social Buttons and Taking Chances

In one of our recent webinars, Convert teamed up with Bobby of Creative Thirst to review a number of things. The site that was discussed had issues related to social media buttons on the homepage. The website was a music-related blog, read what the learnings are for you.

Why Should You Join the Bandwagon?

It is quite clear that social buttons affect your site’s conversion rate. As discussed in the previous section, there are three things we need to improve when using social buttons if we want a higher conversion rate for our site. These are:

Value Proposition

When to Use Your Social Numbers

Text Incorporation

This is what the music blog lacks: good value proposition. Assuming visitors have no idea who you are, why should they Follow or Like your page?

If you are going to use social buttons, make sure that your call to actions explains why your visitors should connect to your social media.

One thing to remember when using social numbers – show it only if you have a substantial number of followers. Otherwise, this will have a negative impact on your conversion. Tests have shown that people are not that interested in following not-so-popular pages, products or brands with small social numbers under their belt. Again, if you have a large follower base, you should provide a good value proposition as to why a new visitor should Follow or Like you.

The music blog under review is guilty of another thing – extremely poor text incorporation. It contains white text on black background making it really difficult to read. They even have black text on a black background! Who does that?

A Perfect Case of a Great but Under-Optimized Product

The next site reviewed in the webinar is CurveBall. CurveBall is really a cool product, the type that’s not very common. The site contains a lot of automatic videos where you can go through. Even better, it treats it almost as its own navigation. This site is really unique and you aren’t likely to stumble on many like it. It imprints and also kind of disguises itself as a tiny element illustrate, whereas in the real sense, there is much more to it. For example, there is a little box that upon checking flips it open and animates. It’s a great concept. But wait… How do you proceed to buy it? Where do you go from there?

A visitor will be curious and want to know more about what it’s all about. When you click on it, it doesn’t get you anywhere, and you are forced to figure it out by yourself. Normally, you’ll think of looking right underneath the box, but when you do, there is nothing there. The site is bound to lose users this way.

Simple Ways to Optimize Conversion

Here are simple ways to optimize conversion and the results of not following these basic methods:

Design a user-friendly site

Provide complete information for your products

Do not take chances

The site owners assumed that visitors will know how to traverse their site, and that their clip is in the popup section under the box will lead users to head over to the navigation popup section underneath that box. What this actually does is confuse their visitors or worse, hinders them from buying the product. Truthfully, this is actually asking a lot of someone especially if they have never been to your site. Think about those who have minimal attention spans and are not really looking into venturing deeper. The site has a great concept, but if you’re going to design a site you should also take your audience into consideration. Make it user-friendly and easy to use.

Another problem with Curveball is, there is no easy way for a user to purchase the product that he/she might be interested in. All that user can do is request a sample or request a template. There is also no indication on how much it costs. The minimum order is illustrated as ‘500’. If you’re going to sell a product, always provide a complete information!

Perhaps the other divulging detail you see is that they are from the UK. So, what if the user is from elsewhere – say the US, or even Australia; and they are interested in buying their products. The website does not even indicate if they ship or serve the user’s market. A lot of things are left to chance and these are the elements that should really go first into testing.

This is an otherwise great site with a great concept and great products, but it is very difficult to use. In this case, aiming for a more user-friendly approach would really be advisable; which would certainly optimize the conversion rate. If you want to find out more about conversion optimization, or hear more about the websites mentioned, you can get a more detailed picture on the webinar here.

As Customer Content Manager, Lem is responsible for bringing learnings in conversion optimization and testing to the world. He is part of Convert.com's growth team and coordinates all writers, editors and illustrators.

We have brought thought leaders, influencers, visionaries and veterans to our tribe. Now it’s your turn. If you have something worthwhile to share with a large community of savvy testers, go ahead and pitch your post idea. We’re listening.